Audio File Conversions

[bayswater]

Am I correct in assuming changing formats without changing sample rates, bit rates, etc, for uncompressed or lossless audio files does nothing to the actual sample values? E.g. change a 44.1/24 .wav to a 44.1/24 .aiff just changes the way the file is organized but not the data seen by a DAW.

I always assumed this was the case, but have had strange results recently with .flacs where the .wav from a .flac was 9 db louder.

[mikehalloran]

FLAC has 8 levels of compression though it defaults to Level 5. Although all are supposed to bre lossless, any hardware decoding is supposed to happen on the fly. It would surprise me if this wasn't the cause of any variance in playback levels.

Since none of my hardware supports FLAC playback (unless my Toyota does), I only listen to decoded FLAC files.

[bayswater]

Thanks.

I was using DSP-Q to batch convert a load of .flacs to .wav to get them into various editors. DSP-Q plays them OK but appears to first convert them internally to .caf. The problem was limited to conversions to .wav. I don't think DSP-Q is the problem -- same thing happened with Audacity. I haven't yet concluded that the problem is with the .flac format, but wanted to understand the format better before digging into other possible causes.